The Ambitious City (17 page)

“What’ya got, boss?” Williams said.

“I’m not sure. Ryan, can you isolate this frame, then roll it all again slowly?”

“No problem.” He clicked the keyboard several times and moved the mouse about. Soon the solitary image occupied a corner of the middle screen while the video footage continued to roll on the smaller monitor.

“Stop. Grab that image.” MacNeice pointed to the frame.

Click, click, click
and the second image appeared beside the first. “Let it roll, sir?”

MacNeice nodded.

Soon a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth image had joined the first two in a grid on the Falcon’s large monitor.

“Before you do anything else, can you label each of those images with the date and time they were captured?”

“Give me five minutes, sir,” Ryan said, sliding the keyboard in front of him.

MacNeice left the cubicle to make an espresso. When he was gone, Vertesi and Williams moved closer to the screen, scanning the images.

“I think it’s the guy in the light jacket.” Ryan pointed to the left side of the screen. The same tall young man was either standing off to the edge of the frame or, in others, half out of the picture.

Williams shook his head slowly in admiration. “Man, the boss has an eye. All this time I was watching the people interacting with Ghosh.”

Returning with coffee in hand, MacNeice asked, “What have we got?”

“The guy in a tan or grey jacket, off to the left,” Williams said. “Exactly. Who is he? Why is he there?”

“How the hell did you spot him?” Vertesi asked. “He’s so far out of the action—barely in the shot.”

“That’s the point. He’s barely there, but he’s always there. Some people stand out because they keep interacting, like the staff. Others stand out because they’re not, like him. He’s standing or sitting among people, but apart from them. Never engaging or being engaged … He’s just watching.” MacNeice studied the eight images.

“I ran the pattern-recognition program and there’s more shots of him coming in now, sir.” Ryan said, clicking the keyboard. In a moment, six additional images appeared above the original eight.

“Just legs and a bit of the jacket …” Williams said.

“Looks like he spotted the camera,” Ryan offered.

“I’m sure he did. Put the dates on those images as well.” MacNeice finished his coffee and sat down.

“Should we review the fractures clinic footage again, see if he’s up there?” Vertesi asked.

“He won’t be if he’s our man. That clinic is too deep within the hospital. He wants a nearby door to the outside and an easy escape
route. We’ve been focused on the staff as suspects, which was the right thing to do—until he hit Lea Nam. I doubt she’d ever seen the inside of this hospital.”

“Ready to roll, sir.” Ryan smiled, cracking his knuckles theatrically. The eight images blinked off the screen, then back on, with date and time in a black bar at the bottom. The screen seemed to hesitate for a moment; then another six images joined the grid.

“Jesus, look at the dates!” Vertesi said. “He was there on five separate days. Who needs to be in an emergency ward for five days? And three of them consecutive.”

“Can you refine the best of these images—what’s the word for that?” MacNeice asked.

“Sharpen,” Ryan said. “I can confuse the resolution into thinking it’s sharper. And I can adjust the exposure so even a distant relative would recognize him. Give me five more minutes.”

“Sir, I’ve got him,” Ryan said a short while later, sliding his chair to the right.

Judging by the door frame behind him, the young man was just over six feet tall and slim, maybe 180 pounds. He had a long neck that supported a disproportionately large head. His face seemed too beautiful—boyish, almost pretty—to belong to someone so dangerous.
How old is he?
MacNeice wondered; it was difficult to imagine that he shaved, or had ever had a pimple. His eyes were large and wide apart; his hair was tousled and probably mousy blond, though it was difficult to be certain, since the images were in shades of grey. Was he intelligent? MacNeice studied the face again and concluded that if a cat hunting a sparrow is intelligent, then this was a very smart cat. In all but one image he was smiling. His expression reminded MacNeice of Chas Green’s dummy—and it was just as frozen. In one frame, however, he seemed to be distracted, watching someone at the nurse’s station, which was just
out of view. When they’d looked at all the images, Ryan started again from the beginning.

“Look—his left hand in the first frame.” Vertesi pointed at the screen. There was a narrow bandage wrapped tightly around the palm.

“Yeah, but it’s not in the other frames,” Williams said. “Can you put them all up together again?”

“Zoom in on that hand.” MacNeice had turned away and was focused on the photo taped to the whiteboard of Taarraa Ghosh’s stomach, with his own hand-drawn swastika connecting the wounds.

“First day, bandage. Then no bandage. He had to be scouting. What other reason could there be?” Vertesi said, turning to MacNeice. “If the security cameras were picking him up—even when he moved to get out of the frame—why wasn’t Security picking him up?”

“They’re looking for action. Someone punches someone, throws a chair or shoves a nurse. This guy was just Smilin’ Sam, not askin’ for attention and not gettin’ any,” Williams said. “I’ll get the close-up with its date and time down to the hospital Emerg—see if they’ve got a record of him.”

“Boss, can we send this image out across the province?” Vertesi asked.

“Not yet. Right now we have a smiling man in a waiting room. We don’t know who he is or why he keeps coming back. We need the hospital report, and we need the motorcycle. Ryan, can we check out the parking lot footage?”

Ryan moved back to the centre screen. Within minutes he’d matched the dates on the frames to the corresponding times in the parking lot, and soon he was pointing to the area in the lot where motorcycles were parked.

“Okay, we’re looking for a two-stroke, whatever that is,” Williams said.

“Yeah, with a red or orange tank—easy to pick out in a black-and-white video,” Vertesi added sarcastically.

“On the right there”—Ryan pointed—“by the edge of the lot. That’s a 1986 Yamaha RZ500LC, in orange and white, or red and white. That’s a hopped-up two-stroke—V4, six-speed, with 8,500 rpms of torque.”

“Are you serious?” Williams looked down the line of motorcycles.

“I race dirt bikes. It’s the only two-stroke in the bike pen.”

“What the hell does ‘8,500 rpms of torque’ mean?” Williams glanced over at Vertesi.

“Means it’s a road bitch, sir,” Ryan answered. “Built for speed, not for buying sody pops down at the mall. Its final production year was 1986. You couldn’t even buy that bike in the States—it was too hot for their environmental standards even then, which is probably why Yamaha pulled it.”

“Can you read the plate?” MacNeice asked.

“No, sir, he parked it broadside to the camera. But I’ll scan the footage for these dates and grab him on the move.”

“Who would service a bike like that, Ryan?” MacNeice asked, leaning into the screen.

“Well, the guy who owns this can probably take it apart like a junior Lego set. If it were mine, I wouldn’t let anyone touch it. There are bike geeks I can ask, though …”

“Be discreet, but show the image to your friends. Tell them you’ve been promoted and you’re in the market for a—what is it again?”

“An ’86 RZ500LC. Does that mean I’ve been promoted, sir?” Ryan swung around and looked doe-eyed at MacNeice.

“I’ve got him, sir,” Ryan said a while later, sliding off to the side.

MacNeice and the two detectives took their seats and Ryan moved the joystick forward. The biker was wearing the light jacket
they’d seen on the young man in the emergency ward and had on a light-coloured bubble helmet. He drove in from the right, parking at the far end of the line of motorcycles.

“As far as he can get from the camera,” Williams said.

“That helmet white or silver, Ryan?” Vertesi asked.

“Silver all the way, sir. So’s the visor.”

Once again the licence plate was perpendicular to the lens. “He drives into the same area every time. Watch,” Ryan said as he tipped the joystick forward. The bike slid into the same spot, or the one beside it, five times. “Now here’s where it gets interesting.”

Ryan had cut the departure footage together. In every sequence but one, the biker backed up and drove straight ahead out of the frame—the long way out of the lot, and the sure way to avoid the camera. “Last visit, day five, he does something different.” Backing out of the parking spot, he drove forward and turned left beyond the bike pen, towards the surveillance camera.

“Boy’s got balls,” Williams said.

“Stop the image just before he exits the bottom of the frame,” MacNeice said, pointing to the screen. Ryan moved the rider slowly downfield. “Right there, stop. Can you zoom in?”

“Sure thing.” Ryan clicked the keyboard and with the joystick started a slow zoom.

“Stop.” MacNeice looked at the young man in the bubble helmet. The visor was mirrored but exposed his face from the bottom of his nose down.

“He’s smiling,” Vertesi said, shaking his head.

“Yes, and at the camera.” MacNeice shook his head, disbelieving. “He’s been there five days and no one has even noticed. It’s like he’s been given a green light on Taaraa Ghosh.” MacNeice stared at the helmet; there was a highlight from the sun in the centre of it, just above the visor. “Can you blow up the helmet and reduce the glare of the sun?”

Ryan nodded. The helmet soon filled the screen, the highlight even brighter. Ryan changed the exposure until the silver looked dark grey, almost black. Now in the highlight they could see four short lines—just like the ones that had been incised in Taaraa’s abdomen.

“Print that.” As he glanced at Ryan, MacNeice caught sight of five empty paper cups stacked on the corner of his desk. “How long have you been here?”

Before Ryan could answer, Williams said, “Long time, boss. He was here all night.”

“Christ, Ryan, you’ve got to go home,” MacNeice said sharply.

“Tried that, boss,” Williams responded for Ryan. “He’s takin’ the whole ‘race against time’ thing seriously.”

“I can hear you, Detective Williams …” Ryan said without turning.

“What’s that on your right monitor?” MacNeice asked.

“I’m tracking the bike. I know every legit garage and chop shop in the region. I’ve put out a cool story about how I saw this beauty RZ500 and I want to make an offer on it if I can find it.”

His ingenuity and technical agility made MacNeice smile. He stood watching as each screen scrolled or stitched together something that was distinct from the others. And at last he began to understand why Ryan called the Millennium Falcon a supercomputer. It wasn’t that MacNeice was a Luddite, wishing technical progress had ended with the radio and vinyl records. It was more that his thinking and his aesthetic—for want of a better word—was of another age, when one rejoiced in the beauty of the tangible, of things you could touch.

“Got any nibbles yet?” MacNeice asked.

“I’ve got a guy who says someone called about a crankcase for an RZ500 and he referred him to Yamaha. But Yamaha says he didn’t order it through them, and they offered to trace it for me with
Yamaha Japan. They’ll get back to us tomorrow if they have a name and address.”

“The oil leak.”

“Right on. He’s got a problem he can’t fix without parts.”

“None of them recognize the bike?”

“No. For sure he’s his own mechanic.”

L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON
, Turnbull called MacNeice from the coroner’s office. It turned out that, as he had guessed, the fragment from the drain was from the body of Sergeant Hughes. They’d failed to find DNA on the hedge trimmer but the cutting pattern matched. Junior had had way too much fun experimenting with a coconut, a plastic skull and a pig’s skull—all of which proved inconclusive. Finally he’d tried slicing bone from a donor corpse, and the saw marks were identical.

MacNeice hung up the phone. Bikers and concrete companies. What was the connection? He got up, went over to the whiteboard and picked up a marker. Under the photos of Hughes, he erased the
likely
and then underlined
murdered in the D2D barn, Cayuga
.

“Whoa, boss, that’s gonna have an impact on Swetsky’s investigation,” Williams said.

“No doubt. Michael, where do the concrete suppliers get their material?”

“Well, ABC-Grimsby has a huge quarry, and they supply Mancini as well—though Alberto Mancini didn’t mention that.”

“And McNamara?”

“The guy I spoke to at ABC said he thought they trucked theirs in from Orangeville.”

“Further away, in other words.”

“Yes, sure. But why is that important?”

“Distance is time; time is money. McNamara was at a disadvantage,” MacNeice said, still staring at the photos of Hughes.

“ABC and Mancini are both Italian,” Williams noted.

“Yeah, but the same guy told me Mancini had tried to buy the quarry and was beat out at the last minute by ABC. He wouldn’t have been too happy about that,” Vertesi said, drumming the desk with the fingers of one hand.

“It’s business. He lost, then did a side deal to get the material. But where was he getting it from before?”

“I don’t know.”

“But Italians and bikers? I don’t get the fit,” Williams said.

“I do.” Ryan had been working so quietly for a while that the three detectives had almost forgotten he was sitting there. “Bikers are semi-legit muscle for hire. You see them at rock shows, moto-cross weekends, ATV races, wrestling matches—they provide ‘security.’ Even when they go civilian and wear suits, they’re still bikers and still only semi-legit.”

“Yeah, but Italians use their own muscle,” Williams said, looking over at Vertesi for confirmation.

“Not always,” Vertesi said.

“Hiring an independent security contractor—probably off the books—isn’t a bad idea when three levels of government are focused on your business,” MacNeice said, turning back to the whiteboard.